We are on a boat is a mobile app that lets people who own a boat share it with people who would like to be on board. As simple as that.

Everyday, awesome people willing to share their journey with others can use the app to offer their board. In exchange they can receive rewards, i.e. goods like food, drinks or some contribution to pay for the fuel. Both passengers and captains can suggest some sort of rewards that they would like to give or receive. To get started captains just need to publish some pictures of their sweet boats and wait for the requests to come.

The passengers can make reviews of their experience and rate the captains. The authors encourage the participants to be respectful with each other and keep a nice and constructive environment among the members.

We are on a boat was initially launched in Amsterdam but the authors hope that it will eventually spread to other cities with a large amount of channels.

Credits:
Video: We are on a boat / littlenicethings
Pictures: We are on a boat / littlenicethings

MegaFaces is a giant mechanical sculpture that creates 3D representations of faces i.e. 3D selfies. The installation was shown during the Socchi winter games and it was produced by a local mobile company and the london based architect Asif Khan.

The giant screen comprised more than 10,000 actuators that could simulate the shapes of a 3D scanned face. To create the 3D models photo boots were placed in different stores across Russia. Each person was photographed from 5 different angles and then processed to create a 3D model. The computations to generate a 3D-selfie took about one minute.

MindMixer is a tool that lets citizens and community planners engage in public dialogues without meeting personally. It was inspired by town-hall-style meetings, where engaged citizens talk to their representatives and expose their views on the decision-making process. Such meetings, however, require the citizens to be at certain place at a certain hour, something that someone with family and work obligations might not be able to achieve. As a result, only a narrow demographic group can attend such meetings regularly and broad sectors of the population can not let their voice be heard.

MindMixer addresses this problem and takes the town-hall discussions online, through a web application that connects local institutions with the citizens. Universities, hospitals, and school districts can open conversations about a certain topic and collect the views of the community members. The system gives the city representatives important information about the decision-making process. For example, they have access in the back-end to demographic data of the people who are posting their views. In one particular case there was strong support for extended library hours, however they found out that most of this support came from the downtown areas. This data can lead, for instance, to extend the opening hours of only those libraries at the downtown.

MindMixer makes easier for governments to involve the citizens in the decision-making processes and take a wider range of opinions into consideration. For the citizens MindMixer offers an uncomplicated way to participate in the public discussion and let their voice be heard.

The Media Architecture Biennale 2014 is drawing near. Architects, designers and artists meet with academia and industry, when the world’s premier media architecture event takes place on 19-22 November in Aarhus, Denmark, with a pre-event in Copenhagen. (more…)

The Bolshoy ice dome was one of the 2014 Winter Olympic games’ venues. The dome, which has about 12.000 seats, hosted the indoor winter sports during the 2014 Olympics and will be used as a top sport venue after the games. The dome’s design was done by SIC mostovik, a local architectural company, that used a frozen drop as inspiration for the form. The ellipsoid-design is also compared by some people to a Fabergé egg.

The upper section of the building’s facade is made of white aluminum panels that follow the ellipsoid-design of the dome. Additionally there are 38.000 LED installed across the dome’s surface, which covers an area of 31.745 square meters. While the pitch between LEDs is large, they can still be used to display images, i.e. they work as a media facade.

The lower section of the dome is enclosed in glass. This creates a connection between the exterior and interior areas of the building and allows the visitors to appreciate the surrounding areas from the inside.

Cyclephilly is an online map and a mobile application that let the users record their daily routes in the city of Philadelphia. Although it has been around only for a couple of months, it can be already called a success story.

A great thing about Cyclephilly is that it was in part developed by a non-programmer, Corey Acri. He came in contact with Code for America with little coding skills but with a good understanding about the institutions and instruments needed to push a project like this. He and his team colleagues, Lloyd Emelle and Kathrin Killebrew, worked together with the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission and Bicycle Coalition of Philadelphia to design the app. Since the launch of Cyclephilly in May it has managed to attract about 150 users, which in turn have recorded more than 5000 trips. The numbers speak by themselves.

With 49 floors and a total height of 196 meters the Colpatria tower is the highest building of Colombia. It is in Bogotá, the capital city, and since its completion in 1979 it has always played a predominant role in the city’s landscape. The viewpoint at the top of the tower lets appreciate the extension of the city in all four directions.

The tower was first illuminated in 1998 with color lights. This system only allowed to change the colors of the tower and create some basic compositions. However, in 2013 the tower became a new LED system that allows the display of pictures and videos. The resulting media facade is 120 meters high and covers the area between the 12th and the 46th floors.

The 3D Print Canal House is a unique research project that combines history and future: a canal house is 3D-printed in full size with a large yet transportable 3D printer called KamerMaker (Room maker). The printer, developed specially for this project, is inspired by the ultimaker, a “small-scale” open source 3D printer. In fact, KamerMaker works in a similar way: a 3D model is loaded and sliced in layers that are created one by one by the printer. By overlapping multiple layers it is possible to create 3D forms -and a house.

The building project aims to show that digital production techniques can offer flexible and affordable housing solutions for different situations around the world. For example, the needs of people living in slums or in disaster areas might be also fulfilled such a technique. However, an estimate of the production costs can be only be given once the 3D printed canal house is completed.

In the everyday life we might get in touch with hazardous chemicals even without noticing it. Building materials, fabric dyes, additives in food and contaminants resulting from fracking can expose us to hazardous materials. This can have a serious impact on the health of whole communities. When the effects of chemical exposure and the resulting health problems become evident, the community affected faces a complex and often lengthy process to demonstrate the presence and the impact of such chemicals in their environment.

If a community realizes that its environment is being affected by chemicals it would normally have to collect and send samples to a laboratory. Such process can be quite expensive due to the highly specialized equipment and the expert roles involved in the analysis. However such analyses can be simplified by creating affordable yet reliable tools that enable the citizens to collect and analyze samples of for example water, and test the presence of toxic materials such as mercury.

The homebrew sensing project supports the creation of reliable and open tools that can be used by non-experts. The project focuses specifically on spectrometry, a powerful method to identify materials. To achieve this, the initiators have developed a low-cost spectrometer that allows anyone to carry out spectrometric analyses at home, empowering common people to obtain information about hazardous materials in their environment.

Neighbor.ly is about supporting altruism at a local scale through on-line tools. While it has a similar structure to other donor sites, it focuses on projects that are intended for a specific location and are started by certain organizations. Neighbor.ly privileges quality and close connections with local structures.

Not every person can start a project in neighbor.ly. Only neighborhood groups, governmental entities and some qualified non-profits can submit their ideas and raise funds through neighbor.ly. Individuals should team up with such organizations to submit projects. The restriction assures a minimum level of quality and of support for the projects. This is a distinctive characteristic of neighbor.ly that prioritizes quality over quantity.